


Aphrodite's a Great Conversation Starter

by rachelindeed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aphrodite takes pity on the poor fool, Humor, M/M, Romance, first kiss(es)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2019-09-29 07:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17199449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/pseuds/rachelindeed
Summary: The Goddess of Love does everyone a favor and whaps Dean in the face with a clue bat.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [verdant_fire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdant_fire/gifts).



Friggin' Aphrodite.

He'd pulled off Route 66 about 90 miles out of Santa Fe and checked into a fleabag motel. The stained tiles and worn mattress bugged him a lot more than they used to, but he was hard-wired to keep his overnight stays on the squalid side of cheap.

There'd been a bar in the lot across the road. Dirty white stucco, scraggly trees, rusty fence - it was a dump, but the kind he favored. There was a sloppy yellow apple painted up top, so sun-bleached it looked more like a water stain than a logo. Dean figured he'd have a few drinks, maybe find someone looking for a little fun. Most of the bars around Lebanon were overrun with college kids, but this place clearly catered to the blue collar, middle-aged, and lonely. The Thursday night crowd would be a combination of locals who'd hit a dead end and strangers who were just passing through. That sounded just about Dean's speed.

The floor was sticky, the booths cramped, and the beer weak. Hey, you get what you pay for. The bar-tender, though, she was a cut above. Maybe a few years older than Dean or maybe a few younger, hard to say; but in his ballpark, definitely. A head of black curls, threaded with silver here and there, set off a heart-shaped face. She stood straight, eyebrows slightly raised in apparently constant skepticism. There was something in the way she carried herself that tried to remind him of Ellen, but he refused to let the thought surface. No need to make this weird.

He didn't try a "hey, sweetheart" or even an over-bright smile because, contrary to popular opinion, he wasn't a douche. He ordered his drinks and started a bit of conversation that moved at its own pace from polite to friendly. (She knew her classic cars, damn.) He kept his eyes on hers, projecting 'warm' and 'interested,' but the flirting stayed low-key. She probably had to deal with pushy assholes all the time; if she wasn't into him, he could take a hint.

He leaned a little towards her over the bar, picking idly at the label of his Keystone. She leaned in, too, and a tinge of adrenaline slid through his stomach as he started getting optimistic. "Oh, honey," she said, eyes creasing with affection and a whiff of pity. "I know what you want, and it's waiting for you. Has been for ages. Why not just go for it?"

Sounded a bit off, but whatever. Encouragement was encouragement.

He'd let his gaze turn appreciative, but when he glanced back up something had happened to her eyes. Still dark, still pretty, but boring into him with an intensity that tripped alarms. Dean had spent enough time around immortals to notice antiquity when it stared him in the face.

He braced to push himself backwards, fight or flight instincts flaring, but her hand was already pressed to his forehead. To anyone watching, it must have looked like she was brushing her fingers lightly through his hair.

"Let me do you a favor, doll," she drawled, distinctly amused. Sudden pain cracked through his head, and he felt himself start to pitch forward right before everything went black.

Fucking typical.

 

He woke up alone in his awful motel room, fully clothed and not missing any obvious body parts. He wasn't faint from loss of blood; didn't notice any immediate signs of altered reality, time travel, or dream worlds; he didn't even have a hangover.

There was a sparkly pink stone on his nightstand acting as a paperweight. Beneath it, a note smelling faintly of pine read:

 _θα_ _μου_ _ευχαριστήσω_ _αργότερα_. _\- Αφροδίτη_

Dean snapped a photo and sent it to Sam. He thoroughly tossed the room for hex bags, but found nothing. Shuffling to the bathroom, he flicked on the light and the mirror over the sink caught his face.  His forehead was completely covered by a neon red tattoo in boldface capitals:

TRUST ME

DON’T SLEEP WITH THIS MAN

"Guuhnnaaa?!" Dean managed. He pinwheeled backward, accidentally slamming his elbow into the towel rack and staggering to the sink in a half-fetal curl.

His text alert went off.

_It says: You'll thank me later  - Aphrodite_

_??? Something you want to share with the class, Dean?_

Not really, no.

 

Over the course of a long and mortifying phone call, Dean allowed himself to be talked off the ledge. Going after the Goddess of Love guns blazing did, on reflection, seem likely to cost him something worse than his dignity. So he slapped on a baseball cap to cover the worst of the damage and drove back to the bunker with his tail between his legs. He'd just have to hope that Sam could stop laughing long enough to find a fix.

"Okay," Sam said, resolutely straight-faced, puttering behind a tower of books. Cas, effortlessly straight-faced, examined the rock Aphrodite had left behind. The lamplight on the library table caught at ruby facets deep below the surface as he turned it over in his hands.

Mom and Bobby had taken Jack off to Nebraska on a hunt for the weekend. Small mercies. Their horde of alternate universe party guests still lurked around every corner, but at Sam's request, they'd given them the room. That was about as close to privacy as Dean could get, these days.

Sam sighed. "The bad news is, it looks like it's kind of a major curse. According to what lore I can find, nothing except the goddess's favor can remove her words from your skin. There are no spells, no ritual work-arounds. And a goddess's power trumps a seraphim's, so Cas can't just use his grace to heal you. Which sucks, because it turns out this particular curse comes with some, uh. Unfortunate side effects."

That did not sound good. "Such as?"

"The main one's…" Sam's forehead scrunched, the worry lines between his eyebrows hitting pure verticals. With a sympathetic grimace, he mouthed, 'impotence.'

"Imp…did you say _impotence?"_ Holy crap, he was not expecting to hit DEFCON 1 this early in the day. "Woah, woah, that is complete overkill. That is out of friggin' bounds!"

"Hitting below the belt," Cas contributed.

Dean pointed a warning finger. "Dude, not helping. I wasn't even being a jerk! I could've sworn she kind of liked me. What the hell?"

Sam waved his hands. "Guys, look, the good news is that there's also a well-established way to break the curse. Dean, you have to hold the emblem of Aphrodite," he pointed to the hunk of glittery rock, "which we don't even have to dig up, since she already left it for us - and share a kiss of true love."

Dean waited, but no more was forthcoming. " _That's_ the good news?"

"Well, yeah? I can't remember the last time we ran across such, for lack of a better word, _nice_ rules for curse-breaking. It's practically a fairy tale."

"Exactly. There's no way that lore's legit. This is an ancient pagan goddess we're talking about, and you’re feeding me a Disney tagline? Keep digging until you find the Brothers' Grimm edition. I guarantee you this is the kind of Cinderella where somebody's toes get chopped off to fit the magic slipper."

Cas squinted, slipped the stone into his pocket, and went in the direction of more books. Sam shook his head, but Dean insisted. "Whatever she wants from me, it's gotta be more cruel, painful, and doable than 'True Love.'"

"Okay, one: I've done the research. This lore's legit, she'll be appeased by true love's kiss and nothing less. And two: you'd seriously rather lose your _toes_ than try for a happily ever after? That's sad, Dean. Also gross."

"Cas could regrow my toes! It'd hurt like a bitch, but I've been ripped apart by hellhounds, Sam. I've done forty years in hell. I've road-tripped with Crowley. Toes are small potatoes."

"Look at your life, Dean. Look at your choices."

Right. Step one: when in doubt, cheat. "There's gotta be some love spell in this place good enough to hoodwink an Olympian has-been, right?"

"Insulting Aphrodite is always unwise," Cas called from the stacks. He sounded like the chorus in a Greek tragedy already.

"It's not like she's still at the top of the divine food chain, okay? She's not up a mountain being hand-fed grapes, she's bussing drinks for truckers at The Golden Apple." Yeah, in hindsight, that name should have warned him off. He might as well have walked into The Trojan Horse.

"Don't dig your hole any deeper, man." Sam shook his head. "I was reading up on this all night, and take it from me, this chick has thin skin and a nasty sense of humor. And when it comes to love spells, she's seen every trick in the book. You try and fake it, you won't make it."

"Well, we're gonna have to fake it somehow. It's not like I've got a true love stowed away in the garage." Not unless she'd accept Baby as a legitimate choice of life partner. Doubtful.

Sam ran both hands back through his hair, pressing briefly at the sides of his head as if he could see the incoming headache. "You could, I don't know. You could try reconnecting with someone? There've been some girls you've really cared about…"

Sam trailed off before Dean even needed to interrupt. Lisa, Cassie…anyone, really, that he'd been close to who was still breathing was a walking miracle. That wasn't the type of luck you put at risk, ever.

"Sorry," Sam said quietly. "I get it; I do. Forget I said anything."

"Done. So," Dean rubbed his hands together, "ruling out spells and old flames, what else have we got?"

Having returned to the table with a couple of books he was not reading, Cas raised his hand. Dean was struck with a sudden bolt of inspiration.

"We can catch a Cupid, right?"

Cas lowered his hand, frowning.

"We borrow an arrow for the afternoon, whip up a temporary love at first sight deal. A quick kiss should do the trick, then we give the arrow right back and undo the mojo and everybody gets on with their lives."

Sam had on his veto face. It took Dean a minute to work out why. "Except…kissing someone without their consent is a dick move, and they can't consent once their heart or head or whatever has been screwed with. Plus, I guess it might mess somebody up to fall in love for two minutes and then get shoved out of it." Dean scrabbled for a minute, trying to salvage the idea.

"Over the last few years, Cupids have become as endangered as any other angel," Cas observed, sounding tired. "If any have survived all the revolutions and downfalls of Heaven, they must have hidden themselves quite well. Finding one willing to cooperate in such a scheme would be. Unlikely."

Right. Right. The angel situation was dire, and he really needed to keep that in mind so he could avoid hurting Cas this carelessly. Dammit.

He cast around for something else. "Okay, uh. How about. We could…we could get some African Dream Root? That would let me dream up a girlfriend, first off. Then we'd just have to figure out some spell to temporarily bring dreams into reality, which is probably not as hard as it sounds, right? The fancy new djinns are doing it, so it's not impossible. Anyway, we work out the details, Dream Girl steps out of the holodeck. We smooch, and then we can undo the whole thing and it all goes away. No harm, no foul, and no real people get hurt."

Cas was staring at him blankly. Sam's eyebrows gave the impression that, were it possible, they would be clutching their pearls.

"That seems," Castiel offered slowly, "…overcomplicated."

"Congrats, it's a magical, ontological, and ethical shitstorm," Sam summarized. "And, bottom line, it's also a lot more likely to piss Aphrodite off than earn her favor, which is what you're supposed to be doing."

Dean threw his hands up. "You got any better ideas?"

"Yes," Cas said.

He walked around the table to Dean's side, pulling Aphrodite's paperweight out of his coat pocket. "I believe I can help." He held the emblem out to Dean.

"How exactly…?" Dean started to ask, reaching obediently. His fingers closed over it, but Cas didn't let go. Instead, he lifted their joined hands and bent to skate his lips over Dean's knuckles. It was barely a kiss at all, almost over before it began, but in response a flash of deep red light sparked out from between their curled fingers. Dean jumped and jerked his hand back, clutching the stone - now warm to the touch. Cas straightened, folding both arms behind his back.

A muffled, provisionally delighted "holy _shit"_ sounded from Sam's general vicinity.

Speechless, Dean raised a hand to his forehead. Was that…?

He couldn't…he couldn't think. He looked to Sam, dazed. "Is it fixed?"

Sam pulled out his phone, took a picture, and handed it over. Dean stared at the tiny screen. The majority of the letters on his forehead had vanished. The remaining ones had reconfigured, now reading:

…? AND?!?

Cas looked irked. "Aphrodite apparently considers the classics of Regency courtship passé. She's angling for more pyrotechnics." His shoulders sank slowly as he let out a long breath. Half-turning, he asked, "Could you give us a moment, Sam?"

"Already gone!" There was a blur of plaid on the staircase, and the exterior door slammed.

Dean had absolutely no idea what was happening.

Cas tilted his head. "I'm sorry, I don't want to make you uncomfortable. But it seems something more is required." His eyes skimmed Dean's face like a stone skipping water, quick glances that sunk too soon. He took one step closer. "Will you let me kiss you more passionately?"

The unfussed cadence of Cas's voice was so familiar that Dean didn't immediately process the words. _We're looking for some sort of insect-rabbit hybrid. No, he's not on any flatbread. Will you let me kiss you more passionately_. Cas was saying Cas things.

 His brain stuttered, trying to realign.

"O…kay?"

"You're very kind." Cas reached for him, easy and calm. Dean stood stock-still. Things seemed to be moving smoothly and far too fast.

At the last moment, though, Cas wavered. His eyelids flickered in a near-blink. The creases of his face deepened all at once, and he looked so painfully _devoted_. He lingered for a moment, tracing his nose down Dean's and nuzzling tentatively along his cheek. His eyes fell shut as he drifted back to the brink of a kiss, and he breathed, "Dean."

The partial catch of their lips on his name; the brush of Cas's mouth, replaced a moment later by its warm, full press - it was simple.

It was stunning.

Way back when, Cas had pushed Meg up against the nearest wall, full-bodied and dirty and unashamed. This was nothing like that. He kissed Dean searchingly, unguardedly, but without so much as a swipe of his tongue. His hands stayed undemanding, one curled on Dean's shoulder blade, the other light at the nape of his neck. Dean had been held in many ways by many people, but this cautious, banked ardor was new.

Cas's touch was tame but honest. He held back everything but his heart.

Dean was dimly aware that the rock he still carried in one hand had grown hot, nearly scorching. A pinkish light was pulsing out of it, and a warm breath of wind washed across his forehead. He felt the curse break, but he didn't much care at the moment.

Not when Cas was rewriting Dean's ribs again, engraving himself on the undersides.

They broke apart gently. Cas pulled back far enough to see that Aphrodite's message had been cleared and began to step away. But after a second he spontaneously reversed direction, settling against Dean again in a straightforward hug. Dean didn't think twice. His arms rose, his eyes closed. He felt Cas hook his chin over his shoulder, unexpected and reassuring.

"Thank you, Dean." Cas's familiar undercurrents - _tender, sad, sweet, tired_ \- dragged his voice low. "I'll always remember that."

They stood close for a long minute, letting the tension drain without comment. Before Dean was ready, Cas patted his back and let him go. "Glad I could help," he said, and left without fanfare.

Dean sank onto the tabletop behind him and stared at the bricks along the wall. He was very quiet, inside and out. Absently, he ran his thumb back and forth over a bare knuckle - he missed his old rings - and eventually arrived at the second miracle of the day.

He looked at his life, and he looked at his choices.


	2. Chapter 2

Sam, subtle as a brick, texted him that he'd found a hunt in Florida, called Mom and Bobby for back-up, and wouldn't be back for a week. He meant well, but for once space wasn't what Dean needed.

He stood outside Cas's door. 

They were gonna be okay, whatever happened. He figured there was so much water under the bridge at this point, there wasn't a storm left in creation that could wreck them. They wouldn't lose their friendship over this, because losing their friendship was demonstrably impossible. If it could be done, they'd have done it by now. 

Worst case scenario: if they tried to be…something more to each other, really tried, and it didn't work out, he'd feel like hell, sure, and things'd be awkward. But honestly, when weren't they? Cas wore awkwardness unapologetically, like just another fugly coat. Ill-fitting, inescapable, and…his. Dean used to be so scared of embarrassing himself, god. But somewhere along the line he'd finally figured out that one wrong move wasn't going to ruin every good thing he had going. Call it security, call it trust; call it running out of fucks to give, maybe. But these days he was fine with awkward as long as it came with Cas. 

Mostly fine. He shifted on his feet, staring down at the hallway tile.

It'd never been clear what Cas's bedroom was for, exactly. Everyone deserved their own space, a bit of privacy. Dean had set it up as nice as he could, for whenever Cas came to stay. He'd made sure there was a comfortable bed, put in a bookcase. Left a trunk of good weapons in the corner and tucked a spare phone charger in the nightstand drawer.

There was even this one time he'd been trawling through an antique store (haunted porcelain doll), and after he'd flambéed the spook, he'd shelled out for a dusty [Chat Noir poster](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/tourn%C3%A9e-du-chat-noir/twEK9_LCWCduLA?hl=en&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22z%22%3A8.817433783178554%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A3.537513982345582%2C%22height%22%3A1.2375000000000007%7D%7D). No reason, really, except that the cat in its frame had looked rumpled and annoyed in a vaguely benevolent way, with a row of neat claws barely sheathed and a wild little blood rune halo. Plus, he had this vague notion that Cas might like cats, though he couldn't remember where he'd gotten that impression. Anyway, he'd carted the kitschy thing home and hung it up in Cas's room and never asked Cas what he thought of it. But Cas's eyes had been bright and creased at the corners over breakfast the next day, as if he'd seen something he really liked and didn’t want to stop looking. 

Granted, he'd been looking at Dean at the time, not the poster, but Dean considered it a win.

Cas didn't sleep in his bedroom, though, which made the mattress foam a bit pointless. He'd had almost every book ever written clonked down into his perfect memory, so there probably wasn't much reason to go paging through the copies Dean left on his shelves. He owned no clothes, kept no basic personal effects beyond what Dean, Sam, Claire, and Jack had given him as gifts. He needed no exercise. That pretty much just left Netflix all night every night, poor bastard.

At the moment, he was hiding in there. He'd been holed up all day, giving Dean time to bury whatever confusion their kiss had stirred up. Cas was in a class of his own when it came to misguided generosity. 

He probably heard him standing out here. Could've tracked his footsteps down the hall, his breaths and heartbeats. Hell, maybe the gurgles of his stomach or the air fanning through his lashes when he blinked. Dean had never been quite clear on the limits of angelic hearing, or what Cas had learned to filter out over the years; whether he chose to keep noticing things about Dean at a level of intensity that would disgust anyone else.

The door hadn't opened yet, but then, Dean hadn't knocked. He could imagine Cas inside, head cocked and eyes closed, listening. Expecting nothing more than anxious silence and a loss of nerve. Dean lifted his hand, but at the last moment he opened his fist and touched his palm rather than his knuckles to the wood. 

_Cas_ , he prayed, and heard a startled inhalation just inside the door. Dean had never done this at such close range before, never spoken with his mind when his voice would have worked just as well. Prayer made him uncomfortable, less like bending his knees than baring his throat, and he wasn't even sure it felt as intimate to Cas as it did to him. But at least it announced his intentions. He wanted closer, not farther away.

_Let me in?_

The door opened immediately. Cas must have been waiting with his hand on the knob. Dork.

They stared at each other.

Cas looked surprised. Pleased, too, but trying to tamp it down.

"Hey," Dean said.

"Hello, Dean."

He couldn't help a small grin at that. Shoulder-first, he slipped past Cas into the room. The bed was the only place to sit, so he stood. Cas shut the door and leaned back against it, giving Dean an assessing look. 

(Was that. Possibly kind of…hot? Dean wasn't exactly great at noticing his own reactions, but. Cas's eyes felt good on him. Not really any better than usual, though, so. Inconclusive.)

"To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Dean side-eyed him. "No need to go British on me, Cas."

A visible tic flickered across Cas's cheek. Dean could practically see him counting backwards from ten, but after a moment he said flatly, "I'm nervous."

"No kidding." Dean let out a breath, thought about admitting to the same; didn't. But when he spoke, he spoke gently. "You expected me to be long gone on some random hunt by now, right?"

"I thought a hunt or a bar," Cas agreed. "Eventually a bedroom. Probably across state lines."

Dean smiled wryly, a bit stung. Cas shook his head.

"Dean, I know what we did was…unsettling. I'm sorry. If a little distance, a little reaffirmation is what you need, I understand. Please don't -- " 

"Give me a little more credit, okay?" Dean could only pace a few steps before coming up against the far wall. He turned back around, the length of the room between them, and gave Cas a hard stare. "Give yourself a little more credit."

Cas blinked, carefully expressionless. Still undemanding, though Dean suspected he was clinging to that stance by his fingernails. "What does that mean?"

Dean rocked back in a wobbly, full-body shrug. "Well, we're making it up as we go. Remember?" Cas's eyes widened slightly, and Dean could almost see him as he'd been then, striped with shadow and blinding light -- the first time Cas had fought an archangel for him, though not the last. 

Dean rubbed at his forehead. "I won't lie, I'm still figuring out a lot of things. Especially the. You know. The kind of. Gay things."

"The term 'bisexual' " -- oh god, _why_ with the finger quotes? -- "would be more appropriate in this context."

"Can you not be pedantic for, like, five seconds? Fine. But that's not. That's not the point." 

Dean's hand brushed against a half-read paperback, its spine peeling and cracked; it lay facedown near the corner of Cas's nightstand. (He did read on his own time, then. _The Martian Chronicles._ Dean had picked that up from a box on the sidewalk outside some bookstore back in middle school. Had it been in Georgia? South Carolina? He'd relished the chill up his spine that blazing afternoon, waiting for Dad at the bus stop: "I said, where do you think you're going?") Next to it was a box of 'food' for the abominable Chia Pet camped out under Cas's reading lamp. Beside that, a phone. A hairbrush and scissors; he'd taken over cutting Jack's hair. Human things. Needlessly, gratuitously human. 

Cas had been reaching, learning. Appreciating. Changing himself, in tiny pieces. It was past time to meet him halfway.

Dean sagged against the wall at his back. "This kind of thing just wasn't on the table for me, you know? I never thought about it. Well, not beyond a few…I'm a horndog, okay, there were days when frilly curtains at the friggin' diners got a reaction. So, yeah, the occasional guy made me look, but no biggie. And you usually can't watch porn without getting both halves of the…it takes two to tango, right, but everybody gets hot to that stuff. It never made me think…there was just never any question about it. I knew girls did it for me. I loved breasts, I loved sex, end of story."

He glanced at Cas. He was still leaning against the door, attentive and intense. He nodded slightly in response to Dean's look. 

"But…the people I…the people I care about and the people I sleep with almost never match up. I wanted them to, for a long time. But it just never, never really worked out. I gave up years ago. Family's much more my thing -- felt like my only real thing. It's where I put the people who matter, the ones I wanted to keep. So, I mean -- Charlie. Jo. Like sisters. Ellen. Jody. Like moms. Bobby was the dad we never had. Jack and Claire -- they're your kids, so that made them mine, too. And when it came to guys, guys I felt a lot for? Benny. You, more than anyone. You had to be my brothers, right? Because that's where I put the people worth dying for."

"Dean -- "

"I'm sorry it took a blow to the head from the Goddess of Love to shake that up for me. I never knew I wanted to kiss you, swear to God. But, as stupid as this sounds…It's not like I didn't know I loved you, Cas." Dean saw Cas's hands start shaking from across the room. "It's not like I didn't know you loved me, too."

Cas laughed, brief and strange. "I do," he said, and oh, there was his heart right on his sleeve. "Madly."

Dean's hands were shaking, too. "What I figured out today is just. How good I am with that. How much I want. That." They locked gazes. "You."

 _You_ , he repeated, prayerful and deliberate. Cas's eyes listed shut and his head tipped back involuntarily. The shadow his jaw cast moved, skating low along his throat.

Damn. Okay. This was…this was gonna work, then.

Good to know.

They stood, weak-kneed, propped against opposite walls. When Cas opened his eyes again, the smile that started at the corner of his mouth carried over to the corner of Dean's. It was odd, and funny, and such a relief to be here, together, on the other side of that conversation. It'd been ten years coming, and ramming that wall turned out to be the best kind of anticlimax. Like gearing up and driving out to battle only to find, on arrival, that you'd already won. They had this thing wrapped up. 

They were in love. Boom, done. It wasn't even surprising.

"That was so easy, I'm retroactively embarrassed at how long it took us to get here," Dean said.

Cas's mouth quirked. "It is unfortunate. On the physical side, there's still a lot to figure out, but emotionally? We appear to have wasted what must be acknowledged as fucktons of energy on repressing feelings that were mutual and requited." Cas rolled his shoulders, philosophically, against the wood grain. "Live and learn. Don't ever call me 'buddy' again, by the way."

"Yeah, fair. Where did you pick up 'fucktons,' dare I ask?"

"Is it not correct?"

"No, it is, that's why I’m asking."

"Claire often curses in her texts, for emphasis. I attempted to reciprocate, but invective, in English, is apparently not my gift. She took pity on me and taught me the ropes. It increases my cool factor." 

"Okay, I'm just gonna have to leave that there, but thank you, seriously. That's delightful."

They stared at each other. It had always been their area of strongest competency.

"Do you want…there's no way to talk about this that doesn't make me sound like a tween. Awesome." Dean paused and scrubbed his hands aggressively up and down his face, failing to flush the embarrassment out. He closed his eyes and tilted his head up. "Do you want to make-out? And see if we like it, or whatever?"

"You're proposing sexual experimentation."

"No," Dean meeped. "Not, uh, _sexual_ -sexual. I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying never. I'm just -- With you, it would be. It…will be. Wonderful. When we." Cas squinted at him. Dean became aware that he was formlessly gesturing and made himself stop. "I'm just gonna need to work up to the whole…full Monty kind of…dammit. You don't care if I'm crass, so here it is: I've never touched another guy's junk. Not too sure how that's gonna fly once we get there, but even talking about it is messing with me right now. Not that I think I'll hate it, I don't, but I'm not ready to just..." A wildfire blush spread from cheeks to ears to forehead. "If you're okay with that, if you can give me time, then…for now, I'm talking kissing, Cas. Like before. But sort of on the bed, with the door extremely locked. Does that. Does that sound good to you?"

Without hesitation, Cas flicked his wrist. Behind him, the door's bolt slid and the lock clicked. He'd just. Just used his grace for that. Dean swallowed, abruptly aware that Cas had more ways to touch him than he'd ever considered. _Fuck._

Cas crossed the room, slow and intent. He looked amused, protective. Awed. Very deeply happy. So many gentle and earnest things that it would have been easy to miss the wickedness, the desire, the mirth rising fast to euphoria. He spoke deliberately, sounding almost normal, but he was as far from self-possessed as Dean had ever seen him. 

"Would you like to 'try it on' with me now?" He did the finger quotes again, deadpan, but he was laughing at himself. Teasing. 

This was Cas flirting, and he made it look easy; ridiculous, awkward, and good. Dean couldn't think what to say. "Just," he repeated helplessly, "to see if we like it."

Cas reached him. Touched fingertips to his cheek. His other hand kept moving, brushing past Dean's shoulder to brace against concrete. 

"That much," he promised, quiet, "is more certain than sunrise."

A rustle of clothes, a breath on his lips, and Cas was kissing him into the wall. Open-mouthed and heated; bruising and gentle. Incautious, but not wild. With such a strength disparity between them, every touch had to be mindful. Every mark Cas left, he meant to leave.

Dean kissed back. Eased Cas's head around, taught him how to taste more deeply. It was catching the tail of the comet; pouring wine till it overflowed.

 _My cup runneth over_ , he prayed, and the shocked, blissful noise Cas made was incredible. _Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me. All the days of my life._

They wrapped their arms around each other blindly. Cas pinned one of his wrists and Dean shook, uncoordinated and soaring. His gut lit, a hundred filaments spreading, and... 

So. 

When Dean was a kid, his life was defined by a pretty small roster of places: the car, the diners, motels, cemeteries, laundromats, and classrooms. But there were also outliers -- a few places scattered across the map that'd actually felt carefree. Arcades and movie theaters, Bobby's scrapyard, a library or two. And every once in a blue moon, those little po-dunk craft fairs where it didn't matter if you had no money 'cause they let you in for free.

Dean had sat on rickety bleachers and watched glassblowers pull tiny, blazing lights out of their kilns. They molded the searing glass to the end of long pipes, spinning them in steady rotations. They breathed into them, over and over, and waited for that touch of air and fire to bloom.

And the thing about it was, the change didn't happen right away. Yeah, he could feel the heat held in and simmering, the dizzy sense of movement, the new breaths working their way deep, warm as a bellows. 

But there was a difference between being touched and being reshaped. Any shift that complete took effort. It took choice.

Dean let it happen. The center gave and his heart, with all its brittle pieces that had never managed to grow without breaking, flowed molten and stretched. Swooped.

Shone.

Anyway. It was a good kiss.


	3. Chapter 3

Thirty minutes and many discarded shirts later, Dean was floating on endorphins and memory foam, drunk on life.

Cas was. Just. Off the charts.

No one so inexperienced had any right to be this _fucking incendiary_. Honestly, if you'd asked him yesterday, Dean would've said he was no stranger to thoroughly liberated sex? Turns out, though, there's a palpable difference between overcoming your inhibitions and never having any to begin with. Even going slow, Cas tasted of absolute shamelessness.

Being wanted so completely was…ah. Messing with his head a little. But Cas…he made wonderful sounds. Whispered beautiful things.

Dean'd never cared for Enochian before. He'd considered it an ugly language — all short, disconnected syllables, expressionless. He'd seen it as the outgrowth of a culture without freedom; every phrase was a statement or command. But there was a flip side that he was only just discovering. These words had been made, first and foremost, for praise, even as Castiel himself had been made for it, in the beginning. Dean had never known him at the height of his faith, when he'd sung his worship in the choirs of heaven. 

He wouldn't trade away Cas's doubts or rebellions, but it was amazing to glimpse this side of him, too, all threaded through with consuming reverence. As if, by holding Dean, he was filling in some interior hollow; becoming paradoxically more angelic, even flushed with plain desire. Cas's human tongue filtered out the shattering power his native language would've carried in his true voice. But even so, the canticles he breathed into Dean's skin, rapturous and bright, still struck the shadows from the room.

In certain times and places it was possible to forget that Cas was an angel, but the bedroom wasn't going to be one of them.

When Dean had pushed him back onto the mattress, his reading lamp had flamed out in a shower of sparks, just like old times. The ugly overhead fluorescents throbbed. Even underground under layers of concrete, they'd caught the faint echo of what must have been truly explosive thunder overhead.

Dean couldn't help it; he'd cracked up. "That you, Romeo?"

Cas'd muttered, "No, it's you," voice muffled against Dean's collarbone. Dean may possibly have lost his breath a little. Then Cas had added, "… Juliet," and that swung them right back to hilarity.

Curled on top of the covers, they made out for a geologic age. Dean worked his mouth softly. Cas's hands played over him, meandering and clever. They weren't even undressed. Apart from Dean's shirts, they'd only managed to lose a coat, a jacket, three shoes, and one tie between them. Cas's button down was scrunching up under his back, dragging across the dark sheets. Neither of them could quite stop smiling.

Toothy kisses slanted into gentle bites. Dean really hadn't known what to expect once his fingers finished with Cas's shirt buttons, but the tan of his chest and curve of his bones were _lovely_. He scritched his nails lightly down his throat, discovered a tiny hint of stubble and thumbed at it. Cas hummed.

"How is this so easy?" Dean asked, half-serious. "You don't think I've got some lingering, I don’t know…Aphrodite-hangover? Some temporary whammy that's got me not panicking when I should, by all the laws of Chuck and man, be panicking?"

"My Father made no laws against us, or this. You remember how He lived on Earth — far from prudish, it's safe to say. And as for Aphrodite, I don't sense any further trace of her influence." Cas pushed himself up, arms bracketing Dean's head. They were. Kind of nice. As arms go. Cas gave a half-smile, slant and wry, and Dean could almost feel it on his skin, like a thumb coming to rest at the base of his throat. "Do you usually panic at this stage? That was not my impression of you, Dean."

"Shut up," Dean huffed and jabbed him right where his ribs gave way to stomach. Cas collapsed back on top of him and, fuck, that was a mistake, too heavy. "I'm serious," Dean grunted, shoving at him. "We can't go from zero to married without any transitional steps."

Cas nipped his ear in cordial dissent. "There were many transitional steps."

Dean shrugged, because yeah. "Still feels like I oughta be freaking out any minute, though. 

"Okay." Cas nuzzled his jaw. Fingertips brushed up his spine, then slowed, rubbing at a shoulder blade. "Okay. Should we stop for the moment?"

"Like hell," Dean grumbled and tipped them over. Legs off-center, chests flush, he slid on top and tugged Cas's head back. He arched prettily. "Party now, panic later. Don't argue." Cas glared at that, and Dean crinkled his nose at him. "I'm fine. Weirdly fine, granted. But I say we roll with it."

Cas raised an eyebrow but settled under him, as pliant as he was likely to get. Dean appreciated the view and the vote of confidence. Cas wasn't interested in second guessing him. Plus, it apparently did something for him to bow beneath such light manhandling.

_Kinda kinky for a nerd angel_ , Dean noted prayerfully, and Cas laughed. Dean reached out to catch the thrum of bared throat under his palm. His thumbs found the hinges of Cas's jaw and tipped his head back farther, easing the line of his neck into full extension. He rubbed gently downward, drawing the skin taut and watching Cas's shift from laugh to moan in the ripple of his Adam's apple.

He lifted one hand to touch the lines around Cas's eyes; they deepened as he smiled wider. Happiness was a piercingly good look on him. Dean had caught glimpses over the years, but god, never like this.

Being together this way should feel completely foreign, but it didn't. It was one of those things he probably couldn't approach headfirst. Sometimes the whole rest of him would be working away out of sight, digging and sifting and breaking down the important shit that was just too big to face. That's what'd happened with his crappy childhood traumas, he was well aware — the awful transition from loyalty to anger had taken years. A more hesitant shift to acceptance had taken years more. There were continents inside him that ground against each other, and though occasional earthquakes broke through, most tectonics stayed submerged and unexamined. For better and for worse, that's how he was.

The underlying attraction here felt too overwhelming to be new. His body recognized it, even if his brain was scrambling to catch up. He must've blindly adjusted to the tension long ago.

How long, though?

Dean gave it two seconds' thought and realized he barely needed to search for that answer. "Purgatory," he concluded quietly. "Right?"

It was a non-sequitur, but Cas understood what he meant. He pressed a hand against Dean's and admitted, "Earlier, for me."

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

Dean smiled, weirdly nervous. "Love at first sight?"

Cas looked ready to deny it, then paused, frowning. His eyes moved back and forth in memory. "Hard to say," he decided. "It seems insulting to think I might have loved you before I really knew you, and certainly what I felt then was nothing compared to what I came to feel. But my reaction was strong from the beginning, though there were many factors wrapped up in that. Not all of them flattering." Cas reached up, unthinkingly precise, tracing the dips of bone from Dean's temple to cheek. "Too much of what I felt was pride, at first. Resurrection of the dead and damned had always been reserved for God and his archangels, so it was thrilling to be granted a chance to wield that power and privilege. Back in the garrison I imagined that, were I to be the one to reach you, it would be the most glorious moment of my life."

Dean grimaced and Cas winced, rueful. "But then it actually happened. Finding you, holding you as you healed was…transformative. And it _was_ glorious, Dean, but only because you were. And afterwards, all through that year of arguments, it wasn't self-congratulation I felt when we spoke. Nothing so petty could've survived any real acquaintance with you."

"Uh-huh. So you liked me because I relentlessly dragged you, is what you're saying."

"I wanted your approval," Cas said. "But I also just…gravitated to you. I hated to see you hurt, and that seemed to be all I ever saw." Cas ran the pad of his thumb across Dean's lip, delicate as if it were a bruise. "You made detachment impossible." Dean was only beginning to learn Cas's hands, but this particular hunger in them — the itch to heal, the impatience to pinpoint pain and _take_ it — was long familiar. "By the time I rebelled, at least, I was ready to put your life before my own, which is a kind of love. It took longer, though, to reach real tenderness. To put not only your life, but your happiness first." Regret tinged his voice. "I think that only happened — or I only became aware that it had happened — when I tried to save Sam from hell."

Dean took a hard breath, side-swiped. "Oh god. That didn't exactly work out."

"I know."

Dean bit his lip and stared. Cas lowered his hand and lay there, wide open with the queasy sort of nakedness that came with baring old scars to new lovers. In this case, though, Dean had a scar to match. He could feel the relaxed mood, the easy elation that had carried them this far, slipping.

He could lean down and chase it. Cas would let him, would love him not the slightest bit less. Or…

They could follow the thread. Rehearse the greatest hits in the shitshow of their personal history. This was the friggin' problem with being emotionally intimate for a decade and physically intimate for less than an hour: the scales were weighted toward soul-baring, like it or not.

Dean bent down slowly, watching an impressive run of conflicting expressions flit through Cas's eyes, and kissed the corner of his mouth. Then he half-rolled his eyes and slumped off Cas onto his side, propping himself on an elbow. His rested his other hand, loose, on Cas's chest, and felt the movement of a deep, relieved breath. They just looked at each other for a minute.

"I never really…we found out you’d been behind the whole botched resurrection thing with Sam at the worst possible time, you know? And I didn't — I never quite. Understood. I mean," Dean sighed, "I get that you wanted to help, even with the whole screwed up mess you were getting yourself into. But it's just…it was over. Really over, and— "

He knew his body's tics. Always, with oncoming grief, this strangely painful dry spot at the back of his throat, threatening to spread. It was distracting, an air bubble rising and raw around the edges. His words would start coming out patchy soon, so he rushed. " —and for once, we'd actually accepted that, Sam and me. Never before and never again, maybe, but right at that moment, we were done. It seems strange, now that I think about it, that you were the one to take matters into your own hands, when…you didn't even love Sam, did you? Not like you do now."

"I respected Sam. I cared about his fate. But no, we weren't particularly close. I could see the justice in saving him, regardless. We owed him our lives, and the world besides; he deserved our loyalty. But the passion to risk a rescue, to see it through — I got that from you."

Dean slowly shook his head. That. Could not be right. He hadn't. He just…hadn't had that in him.

Cas caught his face between his hands. "I loved you already, and you loved him. You would never have been happy as long as you knew he was suffering. I've never really understood how either of you could have pretended otherwise."

And what could he say to that?

Dean had pretended otherwise, he'd pretended so hard he'd felt like his guts were bursting half the time. He'd fixed cars and watched football and loved Lisa and Ben, honestly he had. But he'd done it from underneath a slab of blank, unshifting misery. Outside of hell, he'd never hurt worse. He'd tried so hard to make everything work; he'd given himself no time to grieve. And some of that had been about trying to learn to live like a person, but most of it was because Sam had asked him to. His very last request.

There was an irony in there, probably. For all their determination to Braveheart their way through the end of days and go down screaming 'freedom!'…he'd ended up trying to live his life for Sam. Much the same way he'd used to live it for Dad. And Sam's wishes for him were so much kinder than Dad's had ever been, but they hadn't worked out any better in the end.

"God brought me back," Cas said. "He charged me with strength and grace enough to revive Bobby. But nothing beyond that; I had no power to help Sam. He giveth and He taketh away, as they say, and apparently there weren't enough miracles to go around. So I made my own plans, and I came to you to say goodbye."

Wait, what? "You never said goodbye to me, Cas. You never told me a damn thing."

"Of course I didn't tell you. If I failed, it would have been cruel to have promised you your brother back. You'd have waited for us, and eventually you'd have tried to come after us. It would have been the suicidal disaster that Sam had sacrificed himself to avoid, and I didn't want to drag you down with me any more than he did. So I made sure that if you never heard from me again, you wouldn't worry. You'd think I was in heaven."

Holy _fuck_. Dean's throat convulsed. The only nightmare worse than losing the people he loved was losing them without knowing it, just letting them out of his sight one too many times and then spending the rest of his life calling after someone who'd never answer again. Cas was always pulling this shit, because he didn't understand that his own disappearance was a cruelty.

God, it had started right there.

"I told you I was going back to my home to restore order there. I asked what you would choose if it came down to peace or freedom, even though you deserved both." Cas paused, abruptly noticing the depth of Dean's distress but misinterpreting it. "Dean, you _deserved both_ , but I knew that if I couldn't get him out, you would have to make do with the free, painful life you had left. I saw your anger, your bitterness, and took courage from it. It made me certain this had to be done, or at least attempted." Cas shook his head, light catching at the crags in his face, so full of feeling. "I looked at you, and closed my eyes, and dove."

Dean remembered the moment so clearly. He'd relived every detail of that day, sleeping and waking, for years. He could still see the streetlights flashing. Hear the rain and the hiss of Baby's tires on the wet road. Sam's absence had been new and unbearable. He'd asked Cas where God's prize was for them — where was their reward after all they'd suffered?

Cas had checked out on him, and Dean had taken that for his answer. Turns out, in a way, it had been.

"You're telling me…You're saying that when you vanished out of my car that night…that was you going after Sam?"

"Yes."

"Cas, that was." He paused with an ugly, breathy click. "That was the very first night he was gone."

It was nine years ago, and they'd all been through hell a dozen times since. Crap as long-buried as this shouldn't still pack a punch, but Dean was reeling. He could've gotten Sam back _that night_ if the rescue had gone right, wiped out a year's worth of grief before it ever started. Or Cas could have gotten himself murdered again, twice in twenty-four hours, the self-martyring dick. Between Lucifer and Michael, it was a miracle he hadn't wound up a red smear on the walls in the most godforsaken corner of hell.

Or he could have trapped himself in that Cage right alongside Sam, forever. He'd flapped off into the jaws of eternal torment, and he'd left Dean none the wiser _on purpose_.

Cas reached for him, disconcerted. Explanations kept coming out of him, like that would help. "I had to move quickly if I was going to move at all, while the armies of heaven and hell were in chaos. None of them had recovered yet from the shock of losing Michael and Lucifer together. Hell was largely deserted, the seals around the Cage still broken. And heaven's eyes were not on me again, not yet. It was the only chance I was likely to get. It took an army to fight our way to you, but for Sam, the best hope was for one of us to sneak through unnoticed."

Dean covered his eyes, fingers pinching tight at the bridge of his nose. He dropped his head and nodded mechanically, then made a visible effort to shuck his mood off.

"Very Tolkien," he managed. "You Frodo'd your way to Mount Doom."

Cas stayed worried, but his mouth twitched a little in response. "Frodo walked to Mordor, Dean. I flew. Much faster."

"Damn. The Eagles really do solve everything."

Cas tilted into him. Dean gave himself over to aching kisses. There was no heat to it, only comfort and apology, each touch sliding, soft, into the next. Dean half-swallowed the sounds caught in his throat, but Cas heard them and clung tighter. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "So sorry. The last thing I wanted was to make you unhappy. I should have let the past lie."

"No, I'm glad you…I want to know this. It's just hard, knowing how much better things might have gone. And how much worse. How fucking close I came to losing you both."

"I loved you," Cas said helplessly.

"You should've told me," Dean insisted, nearly shaking him. "God, you should always. If you're putting yourself on the line, you gotta say. Don't leave, don't lie. Don't just…not come back. I get why you did it, why you've kept doing it, but it's not kind, Cas. Please believe me, it's the _opposite of kind_."

Cas stared at him, a little bewildered but very solemn. "Okay. I'm sorry. I didn't…I didn't realize how strongly you felt about it. I'll try not to be…unkind."

Dean couldn't help seizing up a little. If Cas didn't know how much he meant to him, that was Dean's fault. He hadn't told him well enough, or often. A lot of the time he hadn't told him at all.

Case in point. "We never thanked you, did we? For breaking Sam out."

Cas dropped his eyes with a wince. " _Breaking_ was the operative word. I didn't deserve your thanks."

It was hard to argue with that, especially given the whole clusterfuck that had been going down at the time. And honestly, this was a conversation Cas needed to have with Sam even more than Dean. But his intentions had been so good, and the personal risk so terrible. That had to count for something. He took Cas's hand, folding it between his own.

Cas sighed. "I never did figure out exactly what went wrong. I don't know why Lucifer had a stronger hold on Sam's soul than his body — it should have been the opposite, that's how vessels are supposed to work. I thought the bars would keep Lucifer inside the way they'd been designed to, and that everything human in Sam would be able to pass through. The Cage was never intended to hold someone like him. Lucifer had no vessel when God first cast him down. He was repulsed by humans, that was at the heart of his rebellion, and he wouldn't lower himself to inhabit one in those days. His prison was warded to contain _grace_ , not mortal souls or bodies, so I tried to use it to separate out the angel from the man."

Dean nodded slowly. He could see how that might have worked.

Cas grimaced. "It was a shot in the dark. I'd never heard of anyone jury-rigging a celestial exorcism by physically pulling a host somewhere his angel couldn't follow, but it was the best plan I could come up with on short notice. And my own little wavelength of divine light was narrow enough, compared to an archangel's, that once I reached the Cage, I could almost slip through the chinks myself. I tore pieces of my grace out, then, little by little, until I was nearer to human and metaphysically small enough to fit."

"You did _what?_ "

"It would have been simpler to excise the whole of it cleanly," Cas observed clinically. "But I needed my wings to get in and out with Sam, so I had to rip away at the rest of it. I'd seen Anna do something similar; I knew I could recover, and I did. I reabsorbed all the fragments afterward and was whole again. Although, to be honest, that portion of my grace hasn't been quite right ever since. I must have wrenched something intangible, because my strength fractures unpredictably and tends to wax and wane without warning. It's annoying."

Dean had been confused for years about why some days Cas seemed close to fully-powered and others he was barely stronger than a normal man. He'd half convinced himself it was nothing, that the seeming fluctuations were all in his head. But _of course_ the idiot had maimed himself to save a Winchester and then hadn't bothered to mention that fact for a decade.

God, he might as well be dating _himself_ , Cas was so on-brand with his style of bullshit.

"When I dragged Sam out, it was all a blur. I had to move fast; Michael and Lucifer could have killed me with a thought. But I had surprise on my side for the space of a breath and that was enough. I honestly thought I had him. But somehow, passing through the Cage while he was still possessed ripped his body and soul apart — I did that to him. If I'd been paying attention it would have been obvious that something was wrong, but," Cas bowed his head, "I was just so glad to be alive. So proud to have 'saved' him. I ignored the warning signs. I watched him walk away from you and told myself it must be a normal reaction after all he'd been through. That I should just leave the two of you to work it out."

He held tight to Dean's hands. "I hurt Sam terribly. I failed you both. And that was only the beginning."

Dean had to lean over and figure out how to unclench whatever was pounding in his chest, had to breathe. But even sweaty and wheezing, he bent to Cas, leaning their foreheads together. A delicate pulse of grace pooled through him, soothing and deep. Cas's arms slipped under his, and Dean felt him tracing tiny circles at the knob of each elbow.

Once Dean had his breath back, he said, "Listen. The lives we lead, we all got plenty to be ashamed of. We make mistakes, we hurt people — sometimes the same people we're trying to save. You did horrible things back then, we both know it. But don't ever think that pulling Sam back to earth was one of them. You did your best on that, and because of you, we were able to get him all the way back in the end. I don't give a damn if it was arrogant. You broke into the darkest depths of hell with no help from God, or the angels, or me. No one told you to, no one expected you to. I sure as hell never asked you to. It was just…all you. You were fucking brave, Cas."

He pulled back and raised a hand to his cheek. "Sam and I were lucky to have you. Even in our worst moments, a part of me always knew that."  

The look in Cas's eyes was too much, Dean couldn't quite manage to hold steady. But his choked, quiet "thank you, Dean" laid a lot of regrets to rest.

They sat together a while, not needing anything more. Eventually, Cas's knuckles brushed over the curve of Dean's shoulder. Dean shivered a little, starting to relax. Cas fitted his hand to the space on Dean's skin where the outline of his fingers had burned, years ago. "I did have some experience at snatching Winchesters from perdition," he observed, deliberately bland. "That may have contributed to my over-confidence."

It was an obvious bid to lighten the mood, and normally Dean would have jumped at it. But somehow, what slipped out instead was: "I wish I could remember."

Cas blinked at him, surprised. Dean shrugged and added, "I don't even know why I can't. Shock or something, maybe. But it's not like I forgot what it felt like dying in the first place. Or all the partytimes after, down in the Pit. If shock were gonna do anything for me, it should have blurred those out."

Cas searched his face, nodding cautiously. "It puzzled me, too, at the time. I couldn't see why you would cling to the memory of every horror in hell, but block out those final moments of escape and salvation. It clearly wasn't an intentional or conscious choice on your part, but why would your brain fight its natural inclinations to repress trauma and chase relief? But I know you better, now, and I've experienced self-loathing for myself. Look at what happened in Purgatory: I clung to my unworthiness, and your mind rewrote the ending to lay the fault on your own shoulders."

That was true. When reality got in the way of their guilt, they twisted it. They could hide anything from themselves, as long as they felt they didn't deserve better. It was a problem they both had in spades.

They'd tackled it together once before, though.

"You fixed that," Dean said slowly. "The Purgatory thing." Cas had read his mind. He'd touched him and plucked the true memory out, brushed a thumb across the grime and handed it back to him, light as a coin. "Can you…" He took a deep breath. "Could you…fix this?" He gestured vaguely at his head, and then between the two of them. Their first meeting had been a blank to him for as long as they'd known each other, but. "It's gotta be in there, still."

Cas's eyes went wide. "Dean," he whispered, as if this were a gift he'd never known he could ask for.

Neither of them were good at asking for much, even — especially — from each other. But the bottom line was, if they kept undercutting themselves, they weren't going to last. He kept thinking he couldn't have anything good, anyone that gave him comfort. And Cas kept thinking he could just disappear. That's wasn't. That wasn't sustainable.

"We deserve better," Dean said, and heard himself hiding in the words. He was so bad at this, but he kept trying. "I deserve." Harder: "I deserve better."

"You do." Cas looked transfigured, raw with pride. But even so, he paused and forced himself to match Dean's effort. With imperfect conviction but solid determination, he echoed: "I…I do, too. We both do."

Dean caught his hand and lifted it to his forehead. "Help me believe it." He brushed his nails across Cas's wrist. Whether the memory turned out good or bad — or, more probably, both — he wasn't going to let his messed up brain cheat him out of one more moment with Cas, past or future.

He closed his eyes and said, "I want to lose less of you."

A hitch of breath, a brush of lips, and his mind flooded with light.

 

 

Images came to him in flashes. Dean had braced himself to revisit hell, but he should've known Cas would never do that to him. In this beginning — the only one that mattered — they were already in each others' arms. Castiel was all around him, and the scream of wind was torn into syncopated rhythm by the furious beat of wings so vast they blacked out the fires and the webs of iron chain receding below.

Cas's grace now was holding Dean in careful suspension within his own past. He saw the memory for what it was rather than being fully immersed in it. He could reach old experiences and feelings without entirely reliving them, peeking through the eyes of a different self.

The broken, terrified man he'd been was caught up in a haze of radiance. The air was electric with color, like sheets of [ _lightning_ ] filtered through [ _stained glass_ ]. There was movement, constant spinning, vertical and dizzying. Dean stood at the foot of a [ _waterfall firework_ ] that rushed upward to form some sort of [ _forest song sunset_ ] before avalanching back down behind and beneath him.  White-blue sparks swirled over his skin like [ _bottled fireflies_ ] or [ _campfire embers_ ], and everywhere they touched, scars smoothed themselves away and the blood from the rack that his hands were soaked in vanished. A shuddering growl, louder even than the wind, shook him down to his teeth. His brain scrambled to name it -- animal, monstrous -- before it suddenly resolved into [ _the Impala's engine, when the hood was up and he leaned in a little closer than he should just to watch her work and hear her sing and know something so perfect belonged to him_.]

Watching it now from inside his own head, Dean understood what Castiel had been doing.

Dean as he'd been then — filthy, trembling, and panicked — was pure soul. Sam had fallen into hell in his living body, but Dean had died messy, and his corpse was still rotting in its coffin in the Illinois backwoods. Disembodied human souls shaped their perceptions through memory; they saw what they expected to see. It's why every run-in with a Reaper seemed normal at first. Every soul reconstructed the image of the body it was used to living in and looked out at the world through the eyes it had always known. But when presented with something inconceivable in human terms, like an angel's true form, a soul couldn't interpret. It had no real capacity to see or sense, only to retrieve remembered sights and sounds or extrapolate from very similar ones. Pushed past those limits, the soul's perception simply stuttered into white space (that famous light at the end of the tunnel), unless the unknowable could be parsed into more comprehensible shape. Heaven created receptacles of memory for souls to rest in, but they were far from its manufactured peace.

Dean should have found himself struck deaf and blind, but Castiel had intervened. He was plucking sights and sounds out of Dean's memory and plastering them over each conceptual gap, rendering himself more recognizable and less terrifying. He worked so fast and chose so well that Dean hadn't immediately realized that an outside force was rearranging his thoughts. But whenever Castiel's attention strayed to outpacing the army of demons behind them or healing the damage that decades of torment had carved into Dean's soul, the patchwork translations he was weaving in Dean's head noticeably faltered. Dean's vision would white out, or two images would overlap until Castiel's attention returned and synchronized the lineup properly.

Dean braced himself for the moment his past self figured out what was going on. When it came, it was worse than he expected: he'd screamed, curling into a fetal ball and clawing at his head. Not even in hell had any demons slipped so seamlessly into his thoughts, manipulating him from the inside out. It was a violation of the very last piece of himself he'd been able to guard; unbearable, especially at this moment. He was so raw, so hideously ashamed; even beyond the awful, thoughtless tampering, the prospect of being completely seen, transparent, was horrific.

Castiel responded predictably, but terribly. Dean was reacting as to extreme pain, so Castiel searched intently for the source. The grace which had been subtle before buzzed mercilessly through his soul, attacking every possible source of trauma. Dean could feel the memories of a lifetime tersely sorted, and he was bombarded with confused attempts to calm and comfort. _Leaning over a guitar into his first kiss_ — _cooking for Sam and feeling for just a minute like Mom was standing there behind them_ — _scarfing a Roadhouse burger_ — _the thrill of pink lace on Rhonda's bed_ — no, don't— _angels are watching over you_ — _scent of Dad's jacket_ — _wind through the windows going 75 down the highway_ —stop this— _apples and cinnamon_ —

"Get the hell out, you son of a bitch!" Dean had yelled, absolutely shattered. The swirling gyre of Castiel's limbs shuddered to a momentary halt, surprise and consternation rippling visibly. Mental privacy was a foreign concept to angels, but this one, at least, managed to grasp that Dean was hurting because of him.

The flood of memories stopped. Dean's vision barely had time to go white before it went utterly dark as several of Castiel's outstretched wings curled in and draped themselves close. Everything went black, and at the same time the deafening engine purr that had been rattling steadily above the wind cut out entirely.

(That must have been the angel radio, Dean realized now. Cas was pulling them both off of heaven's radar and running silent in the middle of the most high-profile mission of his life, probably flaunting every order he'd been given, because he'd somehow understood how desperately Dean had needed to feel hidden.

The bastards running the show upstairs had probably made him pay for that, but god. He'd been smart; he'd been generous.)

Dean's sobs had gradually slowed to even breaths in the soft dark; he was left alone for a long, featureless time. It was close to oblivion, and that was bliss. He hadn't slept for forty years, his consciousness held hostage to pain and cruelty and boredom from the moment he'd first fallen to hell; he'd forgotten what rest felt like. It seemed mad to think he could finally sleep, penned in as he was by something monstrous and beautiful that he could no longer see. But fear couldn't bite all that deeply into him so long as he didn't actually care what was going to happen. Nothing really mattered.

He slept.

He woke when a hand shook insistently at his arm. Blinking groggily, he glanced up and froze at the sight of his own face staring back down at him. The perfect twin of his own body sat crouched by his side.

Castiel was mirroring him. No more projecting directly into his thoughts, but this was, if anything, weirder. Still, it would have been worse if he'd come dressed as Sam, or Mom, or Bobby. He'd apparently learned his lesson about masquerading behind memories that Dean held sacred. Here, at least, the artifice was plain.

Peering at Dean through his own green eyes was a stranger, his expression curious — perhaps kind. His head tilted and his borrowed fingers rubbed again at Dean's shoulder as if the gesture required concentration. His hand came to rest on Dean's upper arm. Deliberately, he glanced upward, bobbing his chin with a bit of raised eyebrow. Somehow the gesture managed to convey that, wherever they were going, they were almost there.

A whisper of speech arrived, hesitantly, in Dean's own voice.

_Lay your sleeping head, my love,_

_Human on my faithless arm_

This was another memory, but nothing intimate or invasive this time. Just poetry from some long ago English class that had moldered for years in the back of Dean's brain. Forgotten, but not completely lost. The stranger pulled the words forward and seemed somehow to breathe over them, swipe the dust clear. They rang in Dean's head: stiff, dispassionate, alien. Inarguable.

_Lay your sleeping head, my love,_

_Human on my faithless arm_

_Mortal_

His other self regarded him, unblinking. Dark shadows — dark feathers? — glanced against Dean's skin.

_Guilty_

Dean flinched. The hand on his arm tightened and, without warning, pulsed electrifying heat.

_But to me_

_The entirely beautiful_

White light seared into Dean's arm, painless but blinding. Dean swung his head away, his free hand instinctively rising to cover his eyes. "Wh-what?" he gasped.

Dean's mind, then, had rung with Castiel's overlapping voices: one angelic — garbled; multidirectional; static and vast and **certain** as if every word were a declamation — and the other mortal and small, a work of mimesis. A copy, not of Dean's vocal cords, but of the voice inside his _head_ that read and dreamed and argued with himself.

Dean's mind now was merging this first meeting with the one he'd always remembered:

**Remember** — _human on my faithless_ —

"This is your problem, Dean," Cas said. "You have no faith."

A handprint on his shoulder ( _human on my faithless arm_ ), deliberate and stark against new skin. It had been a reminder, a fragment of poetry seared brightly into him. Castiel hadn't wanted him to lose this small, stolen conversation in the shock of rebirth.

— _mortal_ — **Mortal** — _guilty_ —

"You don't think you deserve to be saved."

**Guilty** — _but to me_ —

"Good things do happen, Dean."

**To me** — _the entirely beautiful_ — **Beautiful.**

**Remember** ,

_Remember,_

Castiel paused, and suddenly the roar of the other angels flooded back, louder than ever. With one of his voices, Castiel reconnected, broadcasting his long-awaited message to the whole host of heaven. With the other, he spoke quiet and close, straight to the heart of Dean's battered, cowering soul:

**Dean Winchester is saved.**

_Dean Winchester is saved._

 

 

Dean resurfaced with a gasp, the memory dissipating all at once. Cas's careworn face bent over him, back in the bunker and the bedroom. He drew his hand away from Dean's temple but ducked down to press his lips to the same patch of skin, his touch so tender it felt apologetic. "Dean. Are you all right?"

It was going to take Dean a moment to get his head back together; he couldn't answer right away. Cas waited, visibly apprehensive. "Are we…are we all right?" he added.

"Oh, sweetheart," Dean reassured him. He reached up and absently petted the back of his neck while taking a few more minutes for himself, to process. Before long, though, he felt his entire face get swallowed by what was probably the goofiest grin on earth.

"Holy crap," he blurted. "You recited love poetry straight out of the gate."

Cas blinked, taken aback, then rolled his eyes with his whole head. "I didn't understand that side of it. Not really."

"Uh-huh." Dean's eyes were dancing. "Bet you do now, though."

Cas was already leaning over him, but Dean watched as all the angles and lines of him shifted into something more purposeful. "I do, yes," he murmured. They moved together, rapt and smiling, shifting up the bed until Dean was pressed to the headboard, Cas settling into his lap.

They'd made a good start. In time, they could give more to each other. Someday Dean would share the memory of what it was like when Cas was dead; it was a fucked up way to make him believe in his own importance, but nothing else had worked so far. They could fill in bits and pieces of each other's lives, some of the important moments that they'd missed, or hidden. And maybe somewhere in this sweetly slow entanglement of beds and minds and pasts, they'd learn to have faith in a shared future, too.

But all that would have to wait. For now, Dean had Cas in his arms, and that was more than enough.

"Aphrodite is officially my favorite now," he said. "I should probably send her a thank you gift."

"Maybe a fruit basket," Cas offered, the picture of innocence. "I hear she likes apples."

"Oh, you're gonna be trouble," Dean murmured, pleased, and leaned languidly up to be kissed.


End file.
